SOURCE: "My Brother, Myself," in New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1997, p. 10.

[In the following positive review of Imagining Robert, by Jay Neugeboren, Busch distinguishes between Neugeboren's roles as author and as brother, offering sympathetic opinions of both.]

The novelist Jay Neugeboren would not agree that a discussion of his powerful story—his brother's battle for more than 30 years with mental illness—centers on him, the writer. He would insist that his brother is the heart of the matter. His belief is part of the appeal of his memoir, Imagining Robert.

But he is the writer, and it is he who has found the language and he who has fought exhaustion and despair and disorder, as much on his brother's behalf as on his own. So we might start by considering this story at the farther end of its awful arc: Robert Neugeboren, a 50-year-old man, has yet...